OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
A novel approach for holographic 3D content generation without depth map
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

In preparation for observing holographic 3D content, acquiring a set of RGB color and depth map images per scene is necessary to generate computer-generated holograms (CGHs) when using the fast Fourier transform (FFT) algorithm. However, in real-world situations, these paired formats of RGB color and depth map images are not always fully available. We propose a deep learning-based method to synthesize the volumetric digital holograms using only the given RGB image, so that we can overcome environments where RGB color and depth map images are partially provided. The proposed method uses only the input of RGB image to estimate its depth map and then generate its CGH sequentially. Through experiments, we demonstrate that the volumetric hologram generated through our proposed model is more accurate than that of competitive models, under the situation that only RGB color data can be provided.
Minimizing Energy Consumption for 5G NR Beam Management for RedCap Devices
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2023
Year: 2023

In 5G New Radio (NR), beam management entails periodic and continuous transmission and reception of control signals in the form of synchronization signal blocks (SSBs), used to perform initial access and/or channel estimation. However, this procedure demands continuous energy consumption, which is particularly challenging to handle for low-cost, low-complexity, and battery-constrained devices, such as RedCap devices to support mid-market Internet of Things (IoT) use cases. In this context, this work aims at reducing the energy consumption during beam management for RedCap devices, while ensuring that the desired Quality of Service (QoS) requirements are met. To do so, we formalize an optimization problem in an Indoor Factory (InF) scenario to select the best beam management parameters, including the beam update periodicity and the beamwidth, to minimize energy consumption based on users' distribution and their speed. The analysis yields the regions of feasibility, i.e., the upper limit(s) on the beam management parameters for RedCap devices, that we use to provide design guidelines accordingly.
Measurement Models For Sailboats Price vs. Features And Regional Areas
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

In this study, we investigated the relationship between sailboat technical specifications and their prices, as well as regional pricing influences. Utilizing a dataset encompassing characteristics like length, beam, draft, displacement, sail area, and waterline, we applied multiple machine learning models to predict sailboat prices. The gradient descent model demonstrated superior performance, producing the lowest MSE and MAE. Our analysis revealed that monohulled boats are generally more affordable than catamarans, and that certain specifications such as length, beam, displacement, and sail area directly correlate with higher prices. Interestingly, lower draft was associated with higher listing prices. We also explored regional price determinants and found that the United States tops the list in average sailboat prices, followed by Europe, Hong Kong, and the Caribbean. Contrary to our initial hypothesis, a country's GDP showed no direct correlation with sailboat prices. Utilizing a 50% cross-validation method, our models yielded consistent results across test groups. Our research offers a machine learning-enhanced perspective on sailboat pricing, aiding prospective buyers in making informed decisions.
Question-Answering Approach to Evaluating Legal Summaries
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

Traditional evaluation metrics like ROUGE compare lexical overlap between the reference and generated summaries without taking argumentative structure into account, which is important for legal summaries. In this paper, we propose a novel legal summarization evaluation framework that utilizes GPT-4 to generate a set of question-answer pairs that cover main points and information in the reference summary. GPT-4 is then used to generate answers based on the generated summary for the questions from the reference summary. Finally, GPT-4 grades the answers from the reference summary and the generated summary. We examined the correlation between GPT-4 grading with human grading. The results suggest that this question-answering approach with GPT-4 can be a useful tool for gauging the quality of the summary.
Unidirectional brain-computer interface: Artificial neural network encoding natural images to fMRI response in the visual cortex
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

While significant advancements in artificial intelligence (AI) have catalyzed progress across various domains, its full potential in understanding visual perception remains underexplored. We propose an artificial neural network dubbed VISION, an acronym for "Visual Interface System for Imaging Output of Neural activity," to mimic the human brain and show how it can foster neuroscientific inquiries. Using visual and contextual inputs, this multimodal model predicts the brain's functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scan response to natural images. VISION successfully predicts human hemodynamic responses as fMRI voxel values to visual inputs with an accuracy exceeding state-of-the-art performance by 45%. We further probe the trained networks to reveal representational biases in different visual areas, generate experimentally testable hypotheses, and formulate an interpretable metric to associate these hypotheses with cortical functions. With both a model and evaluation metric, the cost and time burdens associated with designing and implementing functional analysis on the visual cortex could be reduced. Our work suggests that the evolution of computational models may shed light on our fundamental understanding of the visual cortex and provide a viable approach toward reliable brain-machine interfaces.
IFT: Image Fusion Transformer for Ghost-free High Dynamic Range Imaging
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Multi-frame high dynamic range (HDR) imaging aims to reconstruct ghost-free images with photo-realistic details from content-complementary but spatially misaligned low dynamic range (LDR) images. Existing HDR algorithms are prone to producing ghosting artifacts as their methods fail to capture long-range dependencies between LDR frames with large motion in dynamic scenes. To address this issue, we propose a novel image fusion transformer, referred to as IFT, which presents a fast global patch searching (FGPS) module followed by a self-cross fusion module (SCF) for ghost-free HDR imaging. The FGPS searches the patches from supporting frames that have the closest dependency to each patch of the reference frame for long-range dependency modeling, while the SCF conducts intra-frame and inter-frame feature fusion on the patches obtained by the FGPS with linear complexity to input resolution. By matching similar patches between frames, objects with large motion ranges in dynamic scenes can be aligned, which can effectively alleviate the generation of artifacts. In addition, the proposed FGPS and SCF can be integrated into various deep HDR methods as efficient plug-in modules. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmarks show that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance both quantitatively and qualitatively.
Zero-Energy-Device for 6G: First Real-Time Backscatter Communication thanks to the Detection of Pilots from an Ambient Commercial Cellular Network
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2023
Year: 2023

Ambient backscatter communication technology (AmBC) and a novel device category called zero-energy devices (ZED) have recently emerged as potential components for the forthcoming 6th generation (6G) networks. A ZED communicates with a smartphone without emitting additional radio waves, by backscattering ambient waves from base stations. Thanks to its very low consumption, a ZED powers itself by harvesting ambient light energy. However, the time variations of data traffic in cellular networks prevents AmBC to work properly. Recent works have demonstrated experimentally that a backscatter device could be detected by listening only ambient pilot signals (which are steady) instead of the whole ambient signal (which is bursty) of 4G. However, these experiments were run with a 4G base station emulator and a bulky energy greedy backscatter device. In this paper, for the first time, we demonstrate real-time AmBC on the field, with Orange commercial 4G network as ambient source and Orange Zero-Energy Device.
Modeling Evacuee Behavior for Robot-Guided Emergency Evacuation
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2023
Year: 2023

This paper considers the problem of developing suitable behavior models of human evacuees during a robot-guided emergency evacuation. We describe our recent research developing behavior models of evacuees and potential future uses of these models. This paper considers how behavior models can contribute to the development and design of emergency evacuation simulations in order to improve social navigation during an evacuation.
InternLM-XComposer: A Vision-Language Large Model for Advanced Text-image Comprehension and Composition
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

We propose InternLM-XComposer, a vision-language large model that enables advanced image-text comprehension and composition. The innovative nature of our model is highlighted by three appealing properties: 1) Interleaved Text-Image Composition: InternLM-XComposer can effortlessly generate coherent and contextual articles that seamlessly integrate images, providing a more engaging and immersive reading experience. Simply provide a writing instruction, and our system will generate the corresponding manuscript. It can intelligently identify the areas in the text where images would enhance the content and automatically insert the most appropriate visual candidates. 2) Comprehension with Rich Multilingual Knowledge: The text-image comprehension is empowered by training on an extensive multi-modal multilingual database with carefully crafted strategies, resulting in a deep understanding of visual content. 3) State-of-the-art Performance: Our model consistently achieves state-of-the-art results across various mainstream benchmarks for vision-language foundational models, including MME Benchmark, MMBench, MMBench-CN, Seed-Bench, CCBench (Chinese Cultural Benchmark), QBench and Tiny LVLM. Owing to the absence of established metrics for quantitatively assessing text-image composition, we have devised a robust evaluation procedure that comprises both human and GPT4-Vision (GPT4-V) to ensure reliability. Notably, our InternLM-XComposer achieves competitive text-image composition scores compared to public solutions, including GPT4-V and GPT3.5. Collectively, InternLM-XComposer seamlessly blends advanced text-image comprehension and composition, revolutionizing vision-language interaction and offering new insights and opportunities. The InternLM-XComposer model series are publicly available at https://github.com/InternLM/InternLM-XComposer.
Deep Generative Methods for Producing Forecast Trajectories in Power Systems
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

With the expansion of renewables in the electricity mix, power grid variability will increase, hence a need to robustify the system to guarantee its security. Therefore, Transport System Operators (TSOs) must conduct analyses to simulate the future functioning of power systems. Then, these simulations are used as inputs in decision-making processes. In this context, we investigate using deep learning models to generate energy production and load forecast trajectories. To capture the spatiotemporal correlations in these multivariate time series, we adapt autoregressive networks and normalizing flows, demonstrating their effectiveness against the current copula-based statistical approach. We conduct extensive experiments on the French TSO RTE wind forecast data and compare the different models with \textit{ad hoc} evaluation metrics for time series generation.
Balancing Computational Efficiency and Forecast Error in Machine Learning-based Time-Series Forecasting: Insights from Live Experiments on Meteorological Nowcasting
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Machine learning for time-series forecasting remains a key area of research. Despite successful application of many machine learning techniques, relating computational efficiency to forecast error remains an under-explored domain. This paper addresses this topic through a series of real-time experiments to quantify the relationship between computational cost and forecast error using meteorological nowcasting as an example use-case. We employ a variety of popular regression techniques (XGBoost, FC-MLP, Transformer, and LSTM) for multi-horizon, short-term forecasting of three variables (temperature, wind speed, and cloud cover) for multiple locations. During a 5-day live experiment, 4000 data sources were streamed for training and inferencing 144 models per hour. These models were parameterized to explore forecast error for two computational cost minimization methods: a novel auto-adaptive data reduction technique (Variance Horizon) and a performance-based concept drift-detection mechanism. Forecast error of all model variations were benchmarked in real-time against a state-of-the-art numerical weather prediction model. Performance was assessed using classical and novel evaluation metrics. Results indicate that using the Variance Horizon reduced computational usage by more than 50\%, while increasing between 0-15\% in error. Meanwhile, performance-based retraining reduced computational usage by up to 90\% while \emph{also} improving forecast error by up to 10\%. Finally, the combination of both the Variance Horizon and performance-based retraining outperformed other model configurations by up to 99.7\% when considering error normalized to computational usage.
Boosting High Resolution Image Classification with Scaling-up Transformers
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

We present a holistic approach for high resolution image classification that won second place in the ICCV/CVPPA2023 Deep Nutrient Deficiency Challenge. The approach consists of a full pipeline of: 1) data distribution analysis to check potential domain shift, 2) backbone selection for a strong baseline model that scales up for high resolution input, 3) transfer learning that utilizes published pretrained models and continuous fine-tuning on small sub-datasets, 4) data augmentation for the diversity of training data and to prevent overfitting, 5) test-time augmentation to improve the prediction's robustness, and 6) "data soups" that conducts cross-fold model prediction average for smoothened final test results.
STERLING: Self-Supervised Terrain Representation Learning from Unconstrained Robot Experience
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2023
Year: 2023

Terrain awareness, i.e., the ability to identify and distinguish different types of terrain, is a critical ability that robots must have to succeed at autonomous off-road navigation. Current approaches that provide robots with this awareness either rely on labeled data which is expensive to collect, engineered features and cost functions that may not generalize, or expert human demonstrations which may not be available. Towards endowing robots with terrain awareness without these limitations, we introduce Self-supervised TErrain Representation LearnING (STERLING), a novel approach for learning terrain representations that relies solely on easy-to-collect, unconstrained (e.g., non-expert), and unlabelled robot experience, with no additional constraints on data collection. STERLING employs a novel multi-modal self-supervision objective through non-contrastive representation learning to learn relevant terrain representations for terrain-aware navigation. Through physical robot experiments in off-road environments, we evaluate STERLING features on the task of preference-aligned visual navigation and find that STERLING features perform on par with fully supervised approaches and outperform other state-of-the-art methods with respect to preference alignment. Additionally, we perform a large-scale experiment of autonomously hiking a 3-mile long trail which STERLING completes successfully with only two manual interventions, demonstrating its robustness to real-world off-road conditions.
Exploring Learned Representations of Neural Networks with Principal Component Analysis
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Understanding feature representation for deep neural networks (DNNs) remains an open question within the general field of explainable AI. We use principal component analysis (PCA) to study the performance of a k-nearest neighbors classifier (k-NN), nearest class-centers classifier (NCC), and support vector machines on the learned layer-wise representations of a ResNet-18 trained on CIFAR-10. We show that in certain layers, as little as 20% of the intermediate feature-space variance is necessary for high-accuracy classification and that across all layers, the first ~100 PCs completely determine the performance of the k-NN and NCC classifiers. We relate our findings to neural collapse and provide partial evidence for the related phenomenon of intermediate neural collapse. Our preliminary work provides three distinct yet interpretable surrogate models for feature representation with an affine linear model the best performing. We also show that leveraging several surrogate models affords us a clever method to estimate where neural collapse may initially occur within the DNN.
Human-robot Matching and Routing for Multi-robot Tour Guiding under Time Uncertainty
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2023
Year: 2023

This work presents a framework for multi-robot tour guidance in a partially known environment with uncertainty, such as a museum. A simultaneous matching and routing problem (SMRP) is formulated to match the humans with robot guides according to their requested places of interest (POIs) and generate the routes for the robots according to uncertain time estimation. A large neighborhood search algorithm is developed to efficiently find sub-optimal low-cost solutions for the SMRP. The scalability and optimality of the multi-robot planner are evaluated computationally. The largest case tested involves 50 robots, 250 humans, and 50 POIs. A photo-realistic multi-robot simulation was developed to verify the tour guiding performance in an uncertain indoor environment.
KDD-LOAM: Jointly Learned Keypoint Detector and Descriptors Assisted LiDAR Odometry and Mapping
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Sparse keypoint matching based on distinct 3D feature representations can improve the efficiency and robustness of point cloud registration. Existing learning-based 3D descriptors and keypoint detectors are either independent or loosely coupled, so they cannot fully adapt to each other. In this work, we propose a tightly coupled keypoint detector and descriptor (TCKDD) based on a multi-task fully convolutional network with a probabilistic detection loss. In particular, this self-supervised detection loss fully adapts the keypoint detector to any jointly learned descriptors and benefits the self-supervised learning of descriptors. Extensive experiments on both indoor and outdoor datasets show that our TCKDD achieves state-of-the-art performance in point cloud registration. Furthermore, we design a keypoint detector and descriptors-assisted LiDAR odometry and mapping framework (KDD-LOAM), whose real-time odometry relies on keypoint descriptor matching-based RANSAC. The sparse keypoints are further used for efficient scan-to-map registration and mapping. Experiments on KITTI dataset demonstrate that KDD-LOAM significantly surpasses LOAM and shows competitive performance in odometry.
3D Multiple Object Tracking on Autonomous Driving: A Literature Review
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

3D multi-object tracking (3D MOT) stands as a pivotal domain within autonomous driving, experiencing a surge in scholarly interest and commercial promise over recent years. Despite its paramount significance, 3D MOT confronts a myriad of formidable challenges, encompassing abrupt alterations in object appearances, pervasive occlusion, the presence of diminutive targets, data sparsity, missed detections, and the unpredictable initiation and termination of object motion trajectories. Countless methodologies have emerged to grapple with these issues, yet 3D MOT endures as a formidable problem that warrants further exploration. This paper undertakes a comprehensive examination, assessment, and synthesis of the research landscape in this domain, remaining attuned to the latest developments in 3D MOT while suggesting prospective avenues for future investigation. Our exploration commences with a systematic exposition of key facets of 3D MOT and its associated domains, including problem delineation, classification, methodological approaches, fundamental principles, and empirical investigations. Subsequently, we categorize these methodologies into distinct groups, dissecting each group meticulously with regard to its challenges, underlying rationale, progress, merits, and demerits. Furthermore, we present a concise recapitulation of experimental metrics and offer an overview of prevalent datasets, facilitating a quantitative comparison for a more intuitive assessment. Lastly, our deliberations culminate in a discussion of the prevailing research landscape, highlighting extant challenges and charting possible directions for 3D MOT research. We present a structured and lucid road-map to guide forthcoming endeavors in this field.
The Design and Implementation of an Extensible System Meta-Programming Language
Venue: arXiv cs.PL 2023
Year: 2023

System programming languages are typically compiled in a linear pipeline process, which is a completely opaque and isolated to end-users. This limits the possibilities of performing meta-programming in the same language and environment, and the extensibility of the compiler itself by end-users. We propose a novel redefinition of the compilation process in terms of interpreting the program definition as a script. This evaluation is performed in an environment where the full compilation pipeline is implemented and exposed to the user via a meta-object protocol, which forms the basis for a meta-circular definition and implementation of the programming language itself. We demonstrate the feasibility of this approach by bootstrapping a self-compiling implementation of Sysmel, a static and dynamic typed Smalltalk and C++ inspired programming language.
Computing Permanents and Counting Hamiltonian Cycles Faster
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2023
Year: 2023

We show that the permanent of an $n\times n$ matrix of $\operatorname{poly}(n)$-bit integers and the number of Hamiltonian cycles of an $n$-vertex graph can both be computed in time $2^{n-Ω(\sqrt{n})}$, improving an earlier algorithm of Björklund, Kaski, and Williams (Algorithmica 2019) that runs in time $2^{n - Ω\left(\sqrt{n/\log \log n}\right)}$. A key tool of our approach is to design a data structure that supports fast "$r$-order evaluation" of permanent and Hamiltonian cycles, which cooperates with the new approach on multivariate multipoint evaluation by Bhargava, Ghosh, Guo, Kumar, and Umans (FOCS 2022).